Tokyo Part II: Faces of Harajuku

Janice got her first experience working as an ALT today. I took her to my special needs school, Taira Yogo Gakkou. There were three stipulations involved in the principal’s decision to allow her to come to the school:

1.) She would be allowed to come to the school only once.
2.) She must assist in the instruction of the students.
3.) We could only refer to her as Bryce’s “friend” – nothing more.

It also turned out, when we arrived at the school, that she wasn’t scheduled to work with the elementary students because if there was any difference in our accents, it would confuse the children. As it turned out, she got to attend another class to help bake cookies instead. As always, the day at the school was full of self-introductions about where we come from and what we like, origami, baking, songs, Christmas decorations, and this time I brought some photos of Christmas back home.

I think the teachers ended up liking Janice much more than they like me, as they showered her in gifts of calendars, tea towels, cookies, and handcrafted bells. The vice principal even made us both coffee – something he’s never done when it’s just been me at the school.

It was a good day – and Janice got to speak with a few English-speaking Japanese teachers.

***

I’ve included photos from our wanderings through Harajuku and then on our way to Shibyua. This is the second installment of photos from our adventures in Tokyo.

Tokyo Part I: Night in Ueno

Janice and I just got back from Tokyo today and we’ve spent the evening cooking up a stir fry and settling back in – well, me settling back in, and Janice finally settling into her new home for the next 6 weeks.

I spent a bit of time in Tokyo when I first arrived in Japan for orientation, but I was pretty busy with seminars and being incredibly jet-lagged that I didn’t see much of the city at all. Over the last few days, we ate fantastically, saw a ton of Tokyo, walked for hours, and took many photos.

We stayed at a hotel close to Ueno Station, which is a pretty central hub on the Yamanote line. After picking Janice up at the airport and bringing her back to the city to find our hotel, we had a sushi dinner and walked around Ueno for the evening. We ended up in the park with a small bottle of sake, taking in the busyness of the city, and enjoying the clockwork of trains coming and going from the station.

It’s a bit difficult to take good photos in a city that is so vast and so busy – especially when trying to see as much as possible in about 3 days. In many places, it’s about impossible to even stop moving because of the crowds of people moving you along. Many of the photos I took were at a very high ISO, wide apertures, and slower shutter speeds. I often just had my camera at chest height and shot blindly at anything and everything.

These are some shots from our first night around Ueno.

Here she comes...

I'm leaving for Tokyo tomorrow to pick Janice up from the airport. It will be 139 days tomorrow, since we’ve seen each other in person.

I met her 6 years ago in February on a blind date, set up by Natasha. I remember picking her up at her dad’s house in my 1990 Ford Escort, with the smashed in driver’s side door that didn’t lock, the kicked in front quarter panel, the plywood window in the rear passenger side, and duct tape racing stripes. I wore jeans and a brown T-shirt with the words “thriller” printed across it and my hair was slicked back with too much gel in it. I remember her in the doorway wearing jeans and hair that is longer than it is now. She also wore a necklace with a silver flower on it and her Hawaiian Ginger body spray that she never left home without. After driving to a couple of restaurants to find them closed, we ended up in the lounge section of Earl’s at Kingsway and Boundary rd. Apparently I told her that night that I wanted to be a rock star. She was 23 at the time; I was 21.

3 months after we met, I left Vancouver with my buddy Sean, for a cross-country road trip that lasted over three months. By the time I got back on the day of my 22nd birthday, Janice and I had been apart for 99 days – longer than we had been together.

A little more than 5 years later, I left her again – this time for a whole year. It hasn’t been easy being apart after seeing each other almost everyday. The time difference between Iwaki and Vancouver was 16 hours before daylight savings; now it’s 17 hours – the extra hour made it difficult for us to speak during the week because Janice doesn’t get home from work on time. It’s usually only on the weekends that we get to talk.

Tomorrow’s been a long time coming and I’ve spent most of tonight cleaning the place up in hopes that she likes her new second home.

Christmas Lesson

I decided to do a Christmas lesson with my students at Midori no Mori High School. I will be taking holidays next Thursday to meet Janice in Tokyo, so I won’t see these students again until the new year.

They have small classes here at Midori no Mori, so I thought it would be manageable for me to put some photos into a slideshow presentation on my laptop for the students to see. I had about 20 photos to share with them, but I wish I had more. There is so much about Christmas that is unique, and makes it special at home, and much of it we don’t realize until we don’t have it. This is my first Christmas that I won’t be home for. I didn’t even have a photo of a turkey, or my house lit up at Christmas time.

Even still, after seeing my photos, one student made the observation that the Christmas atmosphere seems very different in Canada. Until she said this, I hadn’t realized how different things really are here. Much of my presentation was spent finding out about how Japanese people celebrate Christmas; the students and I discovered that many of the things we do are very similar. Many Japanese people have Christmas trees, stockings, lights, presents, etc. The difference is that everything is much bigger in Canada. Here, people still go to work on Christmas, and it is often considered a time to be spent with a significant other, or other close friends; time is spent with the family on Christmas Eve and then again at New Years (which is a very family oriented holiday).

I had been giving my presentation based on the events of our Christmas last year, but when I thought about the holiday and the ‘atmosphere’ around it, I realized that Christmas probably began several weeks ago in Canada. It is December 10th today, and here, many stores in the mall have put up Christmas decorations; in my English club, we decorated a tree (which stands about 1 meter in height) and made paper snowflakes in preparation for our Christmas party on the 22nd. The party will be about 2 hours long with candy and a small gift exchange. Other than that, there is not much outside of the day in itself.

In Vancouver, many houses and stores will have put up Christmas lights and trees, and other decorations. Stores will be playing Christmas music and they will be advertising Christmas with posters, flyers, radios, and TV commercials. The Salvation Army will have Santas at every corner collecting for those in need. Schools will be putting on plays and holding school dances. Students will be making decorations in class. Christmas parties will have started with work friends, or with family members that will be going away for the actual holiday. Cards will be arriving in the mail and placed on mantles beside the stockings that have been hung there. Everybody will be winding down at school in preparation – except for university students who probably have exams. Dinner preparations are being made, presents bought; egg nog, candy canes, winter ale, Christmas movies, the smell of pine needles, days getting shorter, the air crisper, and maybe a bit of stress, all come together to make up the Holiday atmosphere.

Last year, Janice and I did the unthinkable (in terms of the typical Canadian Christmas – although very accepted and predominantly practiced in Eastern European families): we exchanged presents on Christmas Eve. I don’t think either of us were ever allowed to open presents the night before Christmas, so the feeling of social taboo permeated our night together in our basement, where we unwrapped Christmas presents together. We did this because on Christmas day, we were scheduled to have breakfast and spend time with my family in the morning when we woke up. Then we went to Janice’s Dad’s for a second breakfast and to hang out through the early afternoon. From there, we drove to her Mom’s place in Maple Ridge for dinner. And finally, to my Aunt’s place in the late evening to spend some time with my family. I think we might have even stopped off at Janice’s brother’s at some point that day. It was a full day.

This year, I think we might go for Indian food for lunch at Baba’s. And then maybe get together with a friend or two, if there is anybody that is planning to stay in Japan for the holidays. If not, maybe we’ll make dinner and watch a movie or two.


***Some interesting facts about Christmas in Japan:
-Christmas Cake is very important in Japan. Students were cooking it all day today, so I got to have two slices of cake. The style of cake is what you would consider a typical birthday cake to be like in Canada. They were very surprised to learn that we don’t eat Christmas Cake at Christmas time in Canada.
-Kentucky Fried Chicken is also very popular at Christmas.

A tree in the woods

I find that I’ve been using a lot of profanity since I came to Japan. I imagine that when I return to Canada, this is something that I will have to adjust. But, in the meantime:

If a tree falls in the woods and there is nobody there to hear it, understand it, translate it, signify it, associate with it, does it make a sound?

From my cold dead hands...

BT: Uh, why does the vice principal have a gun?

Japanese Teacher of English (JTE): Hmmm…?

BT: The vice principal, why does he have a gun?

JTE: Mmmm… because there are many Japanese gangsters in Iwaki.

BT: Seriously, why the gun?

JTE: All vice principals are issued one for protection.

BT: It’s not real though, right?

JTE: I don’t know.

BT: Why would you need a gun at school?

JTE: I think it’s for PE.

BT: Why would you need a gun for PE?

JTE: It might be the starter gun for the races.

BT: I’ve seen those. Those are special guns that don’t shoot anything. They don’t even have a barrel. The box says that that thing is a Glock 17.

JTE: You sure it’s not a starter gun?

BT: Yeah, it’s a Glock.


The gun turned out to be an air-gun, although I never found out as to why it was at school. I asked my JTE how to say “gun” in Japanese. After some discussion with another teacher, they settled upon “ju,” which is also the word for “ten.” I asked them how they would say “ten guns,” but this one stumped them for a while.

The Japanese language has different ‘counters’ for different items; that is, when counting items of different shape or size, they use different words. The word for the number one is, “ichi,” but when counting long slender objects, it becomes “ipon;” when counting small objects, it becomes, “ikko;” when counting people, it is “ichi-nin,” and so on. I’m not really sure how many different counters there are in the language, although my tutor said that she would bring me a list at our next session. I should mention that these translations are all off the top of my head and could very well be wrong, but in any case, I’m sure you get the idea as to how counting guns could be difficult; the teachers couldn’t decide on the correct counter for counting “ten guns.”

Both teachers agreed when I said that they don’t seem to talk about guns too much in Japan.

I didn’t get a photo of the gun, but I did get a photo a few months ago of a students shooting a rubber band with a gun made out of chopsticks. It was at the school festival at one of the many events held there. The photo above, with the girl in the Pikachu costume is also from the same day.

A Bit on Teaching

I’ve been working with a new lesson plan over the last couple of weeks with my students at Iwaki Koko. I tried to take on a different teaching style and tried to bring my students into a real life situation involving giving directions.

The inspiration for this lesson came from a lecture geared towards expanding our notion of what teaching really means and the different theories around teaching. The professor gave an example of a lesson that one of his colleagues had given in the past. The lesson was for a math class and involved multiplication. Essentially, the lesson involved putting the class into groups and then writing an equation on the board, something like:

4 x -3 = -12

The class had not studied negative numbers in multiplication yet. Their assignment was to make a poster and then make a presentation that explained how this equation works – without any explanations or material from the teacher.

The students were required to explore and to find their own questions, and then to come up with possible answers as to how, when a positive number is multiplied by a negative number, the product becomes negative as well. To be honest, I know that 4 x -3 = -12, but I haven’t a clue as to why this is.

The professor explained that there are actually many different ways to explain multiplication -- the most effective being “scaling” (a term that I don’t ever remember being taught in school). Quite often, the teaching of multiplication is quite narrowly focused and relies heavily on rote memorization. I can generally attest to this, as my memories of learning multiplication almost exclusively involve repetition of the standard “multiplication tables.”

I’ve been finding myself falling into a rut in my classes where I rely heavily on practicing dialogue, providing new vocabulary, and then setting up an activity where students have a chance to use this language in the hopes that it will help to crystallize it for them. This is based on the belief that we should provide the tools and the means for the students to learn and then expect them to internalize this knowledge so that they can use it later. This is also what is often considered to be “teaching.”

One question I’ve been pondering for a while is, “what is teaching?” is it giving homework? writing examples on the board? explaining things repeatedly? I can explain things, but some students won’t listen; I can draw on the board, but these examples may not make sense to everyone; I can give homework, but if the students don’t understand what they’re doing, it’s pointless.

The best definition that I’ve come up with is that teaching, means “facilitating learning.” In other words, if a student learns something – preferably in line with the prescribed learning outcomes, I’ve done my job.

I borrowed my lesson idea from the example given earlier. It is as follows:

-Organize the class into groups
-Each group receives a starting point and a destination somewhere in Iwaki
-each group must write down a set of directions in English, that a foreigner would be able to understand.

I tried to avoid giving any vocabulary whatsoever, but with most of my classes, I did give some preliminary definitions to get the subject initiated. If there are words that the students need to know, they all have dictionaries, or they could ask one of the two instructors in the room for help.

I decided that this type of lesson would be appropriate for my students at Iwaki Koko after I noticed that many students didn’t really need me to teach them anything. A few weeks ago, after giving a lesson on making plans with someone (We practiced dialogue, we used vocabulary from the textbook, we practiced more, etc.) I asked students to make a presentation in pairs where the students made plans with each other. Many students took it upon themselves to find their own vocabulary and language that was beyond anything that I taught them – which was awesome. I should mention that Iwaki High School students are generally very academically proficient and many of them work hard at learning English.

The lesson is designed to allow students to draw on their strengths and then to build upon their own knowledge to find new language that they can use. Also, part of learning a new language requires that we be aware of our weaknesses so that we know what areas we need to focus on. Students will not only be able to work with what they know, but they will also, hopefully, be confronted with the gaps in their learning.

It was my intention that students would first realize that this was not an easy task; navigating away from the school along twisting roads is not the easiest to explain in one’s native language, let alone a second language. But after some discussion, I hoped that each group would come up with some consensus on strategies for giving directions. Many students began by drawing maps; some destinations asked groups to choose their own destination, such as “Iwaki’s best ramen shop”; some groups made use of landmarks, others counted city streets, some used signage, some took buses, trains, or taxis, and another group gave me directions from the classroom to the school lunch service and called this “Iwaki’s best ramen.” In the end, each group had a product that was entirely their own and authentic to their real life experience.

In order to hear each set of directions, I sat down with each group for about 5-8 minutes and made sure that their directions were given in a way that made sense to me. If there were any gaps in their explanation, I would ask clarifying questions, and if there directions were exceptional, I would ask clarifying questions anyway: “why is this Iwaki’s best ramen shop?” “When was the last time that you were there?” This also gave me a chance to sit and talk with all of my students in a small group environment where they could all help each other and where they had a chance to prepare for the conversation. I think most of the students enjoyed the opportunity to talk with their strange foreigner ALT, and appreciated the challenges in communicating. I also have a feeling that there was a lot of learning going on.

One of the most rewarding aspects of learning a new language is when you work hard to learn something, and then you try to use this new language in real life, and the person you are talking to actually understands you. One of the most disheartening aspects is when you work hard to learn something, and then the person you are talking to has no idea what you are saying. Maybe it’s because I’ve been living in Iwaki for four months, but after several discussions – some longer than others, I can confidently say that I’ve understood all of my students’ directions so far (I have two more classes on Friday, which I look forward to).